大象传媒

I was 9 years old whenthe second world war started, and I was born and raised in Birmingham just a few miles south of the city centre where there was a concentrationof factories all producing munitions and materiel for the war. My brother was in the army abroad and my father was working for the BSA Company as a skilled gun maker.
I had helped my father to erect an Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden. This was a series of upturned "U" shaped corrugated and galvanised metal sections sunk in a trench about 2 m x 3 m 1 m deep and given end pieces to provide end walls and a doorway. The whole thing was covered over with earth and turf to give extra protection from flying shrapnel. (There was much shrapnel about and we boys searched assiduously fir prize pieces! Most of it came from our own AA fire.)
These shelters were provided with bunk beds because we were experiencing air raids of up to 13 hours duration during 1940 and 41. During one of these raids in, I think, late 1940, I had been down in the shelter for several hours with my mother and sister, when there was an almighty bang and we discovered, when we tried to open the door, that we had been buried alive! Needless to say, an air raid warden, who actually lived next door, had noticed our predicament, and we were soon dug out after the all clear sounded. It was a bit hair raising to say the least! What had happened, we were told, was that we had survived an almost direct hit from a land mine. These were parachute bombs and intended as personnel devices. There was a 10 m diameter crater about 2 m deep which ended about 1 m from the front door of the shelter. The earth excavated by the bomb had covered us. As I say, most of the shrapnel was from our own AA fire, but when we examined the shelter end sections, we found a neat hole about 1 cm diameter in the front section and another one about the same size at the back. Obviously a small piece of the bomb shrapnel had gone clean through the sjelter withoutmtouching any of us! A NEAR MISS indeed! The house, which was about 35 m away, had had all the glass blown out of the windows, but had suffered no structural damage; indeed it is still standing today in Evelyn Road, B11.
Dad, of course, was working nights and he and I re-covered the shelter properly as soon as we could.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.